I have always strived for Love My Dress to be a place where our community can immerse themselves within beautiful and inspiring real life stories.
Storytelling in fact, plays a hugely important role in everything we do; we are social beings after all, and our currency of communication are stories.
I love to explore stories through the real weddings we share, but for those of you new around here, we’ve long tried to go beyond just the wedding day in an effort to explore life, love and everything in between. Weddings and marriages aren’t, after all, ‘straight forward’ affairs – they can be complicated, with multiple layers of complexity involved at every stage. We understand this and want to help you navigate your way through the challenges by sharing what others have been through – the wisdom and experiences of others can help us to understand a lot about ourselves and how we build relationships.
You’ll find lots of inspiring, moving and thought provoking reads in our ‘From the Heart‘ articles. Many of these articles orbit around the shared experience of planning a wedding.
Today, on her 19th wedding anniversary, bridal designer Caroline Arthur is contributing with her own ‘from the heart’ article, by sharing her thoughts after 19 years of marriage. She, like every other bride and couple who are married, has her own unique story to share – and it has a gorgeous, uplifting, positive vibe (which is exactly what you’re here for, isn’t it?). She also has several nuggets of wisdom to share that will apply to any of you about to enter a marriage. These are beautiful, heartfelt words that I’m sure will resonate with many of you.
Over to you Caroline…
When my brides ask me if I made my own dress, I always say, “Yes, but I wouldn’t recommend it!”
If I make a dress for another person, I adore the process. I go on, and on, and on – until it is as perfect as it can be, and I pour my heart and soul into it. But for myself, I took shortcuts, ran out of time, kept changing my mind, and it became just another thing on the to-do list.
Iain (man of dreams and the one I married on 29th April 2000), even helped me make some of the duchesse satin daisies on the bodice of my dress. I knew then he was a keeper. He didn’t take shortcuts, and he stuck with the project until I was happy.
The other thing my brides often ask me is “Do you ever make a dress you really don’t like?”
Well, some aren’t necessarily my personal taste, but I totally get that the heart wants what the heart wants, and everyone sees beauty differently. Beauty is subjective, after all. I think your wedding day presents a chance to express your own taste and personality, not mine, so it’s your ideas I try and draw out. What I love is making that dream come true, and seeing a bride’s whole body language change when she can see her vision come to life. She holds herself differently when she realises how beautiful and confident she really is. This experience isn’t really even about the dress – it’s the bride seeing herself, exactly as she is, right now.
My conclusion is take care of the rocks; love, relationships, health, togetherness. Nothing else really matters.
Someone asking you to marry them is just about the biggest compliment anyone can pay you. They don’t put a disclaimer on the proposal – they want to spend the rest of their life with you as you, just as you are. If that’s not a lesson in accepting and approving of ourselves, I don’t know what is.
The most interesting thing about my work is my fascinating window on family dynamics, and also, listening to how people feel about themselves and how they look. People really like to chat during dress fittings, and for some, it’s an opportunity to release tension and use a sounding board for pent-up anxiety, assess how ruthless your own standard of perfectionism is about your own body, and to reflect on all the sticky, messy relationships we have.
Ultimately, I don’t think that anyone really wants to fall out with someone else.
I know I regret the waste and heartache of having fallen out at times with family members when we were planning our own wedding*. (*I wonder why I just amended that pronoun from “I” to “we”?!…interesting, isn’t it, how we edit the past in our minds!).
We, of course, planned our wedding together, but I don’t remember Iain falling out with anyone in his family along the way. It was me who was the stress-head. He simply got on with it and even agreed to get married in a church because it was what I wanted, despite every fibre of his being objecting to the concept of organised religion. That concession went totally over my head. All I was thinking about were those satin daisies. But anyway, back to my story…
Shortly before she died a few years ago, my mum and I made our peace with one other. She kept saying to me “it doesn’t matter”, about all sorts of things. Our relationship was always a bit up and down – my dad died when I was 10 years old, and so it was my Mum who walked me down the aisle. Over the years that followed, I’ve discovered she was right. Most of the things we worry about in our lives simply do not matter of justify the stress we put ourselves through.
Marriage seems to me to be like an empty jar at the beginning; in it, we put the rocks of love, relationships , health, togetherness – that sort of thing. Next we add a layer of pebbles – house, career, hobbies, holidays -whatever is important to you . And last in goes the sand – the day to day minutiae like remembering to buy stamps, go to the dentist, pick up the dry cleaning, how-we-feel-about-who-said-what-to-who-at-work-today, housework, negotiating over the remote control, getting the car serviced, shopping. If you’re not careful, you can find your jar becomes so full of sand, and the pebbles have multiplied so much, there’s barely any room for the rocks.
I can’t deny being unable to resist offering the occasional nugget of wisdom to my lovely brides-to-be during their fittings, especially if they seem overwhelmed, or stressed, or just need a little reassurance ahead of their wedding day and huge life commitment. They may ask me if I made my own wedding dress, but they rarely ask me what the secret to a long and happy marriage is. I don’t blame them, there’s enough to think about in the here and now. I know I certainly never stopped to think about the marriage part. And anyway, everyone has their own story.
On reflection though, for me, much of my happiness in my marriage came down to chance, timing and co-incidence. Right place, right time. Could it really be that simple? So it would seem.
I’m a strong believer that “fortune favours the brave”, but it wasn’t until our anniversary today, 22 years since Iain’s friend Jon came up to me in a dodgy nightclub in Guildford, one Saturday night, and said “Excuse me, my friend thinks you’ve got a nice arse”, that I realised that consciously allowing myself to drift along, rudderless (as I then was), not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, was, in fact perfectly fine. Even borderline brave.
It turns out, that what I thought at the time was “drifting”, was in fact a mistaken case of being open to what life threw at me, and the start of a journey all about finding happiness and releasing control. (We all have our own dramas).
Fortunately for me, that handsome man-of-dreams drifted in to the dulcet beat of “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba, snapped me up, set me free and let me be whatever I wanted to be.
If I could offer a few words of advice to the lovely community of brides who frequent this beautiful wedding resource, “based on nothing more reliable than my own, meandering experience” (Baz Luhrmann), it would be these…
- Don’t make your own wedding dress. Get someone to make it for you. Trust me, in the end you’ll run out of time.
- Don’t ever try and change him / her (Good advice from my own mum).
- Don’t stop each other doing anything they really want to do.
- Don’t make each other do stuff they really don’t want to.
- Love and kindness are always, always, always the answer.
My conclusion is take care of the rocks; love, relationships, health, togetherness. Nothing else really matters. When I saw Iain at the end of the aisle on 29th April 2000, waiting for me in a church he didn’t want to be in, wearing a get-up I’d chosen for him, it all just fell away and I realised it was just about me and him.
On the inside of our wedding rings, both have the same engraving; “Boy and Girl 29.04.2000”. And that’s all it’s about for us, accepting each other as we are; boy and girl, through thick and thin. Come what may.
Look after yourselves lovely brides to be – may you have the most precious day forming those rock foundations.
Caroline x
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Caroline, thank you so much for sharing these beautiful words. Wishing you all the love on your 19th wedding anniversary from all at Love My Dress.
Readers – you can find out more about Caroline through the links below:
